Category Archives: Sociology

Advantageously framing a teardown McMansions debate

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A story on Burbank, California residents opposing teardown McMansions illustrates one way to frame the debate:

Put a six bedroom, five bath, mansion, next to a 1940’s three bed, one bath.  Sound a little mismatched?

A group of Burbank residents think so, and they’re urging Burbank officials to regulate “McMansions” from defacing the character of their neighborhoods…

Her dutch colonial home has been carefully remodeled to stay in line with the character of the neighborhood.

Right across the street from her, a historic house was demolished, oak trees were uprooted, all to make way for three huge six bedroom mansions, two sit empty for months at a time and are up for rent.

Here is what is emphasized in this framing: the lives of long-time residents of an established neighborhood are being disturbed by outsiders constructing big homes that serve their personal interests rather than those of the community. Modest homes next to gargantuan homes. A quaint neighborhood character versus a super-sized, garish character. This is a common rhetorical technique utilized by those opposed to teardown McMansions. (This argument may also include financial pitches as older residents have a hard time keeping up with increased property taxes.)

The counterarguments can include:

(1) Individual property owners should be able to do what they want with their property. This includes the rights of current property owners to cash out on their once-modest homes and for new owners to be able to use their resources to build the kind of home they desire.

(2) Neighborhoods are going to change over time. Suburban residents can be guilty of trying to “freeze” their neighborhoods in time, preserving the features they liked when they moved in. (This isn’t just limited to teardown situations. See NIMBY.) However, this limits the “natural” change that might take place in neighborhoods as new residents move in and social conditions change.

Even this article mainly provides the viewpoint of those opposed to McMansions, it also hints at the common divide in teardown discussions: the rights of owners in a neighborhood to preserve what is there versus the rights of individuals and outsiders to change features of the neighborhood. However, this framing as presented here can be quite effective as it suggests outsiders threaten good neighborhoods.

See an earlier post on Burbank and McMansions here.

College change: syllabi requiring students to check email every day

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As technology shifts, college syllabi must as well: there are syllabi that ask students to check email each day.

How to get students, some of whom consider their school e-mail accounts so irrelevant that they give their parents the passwords, to take a look?

At the University of Southern California, Nina Eliasoph’s Sociology 250 syllabus reads: “You must check e-mail DAILY every weekday,” with boldface for emphasis…

When job offers arrive, Ratliff often has excited students turn up in her office only to realize they have forgotten a form they need to send to the company. Using e-mail to get the form or to send it apparently does not cross their minds.

“Some of them didn’t even seem to know they had a college e-mail account,” May said. Nor were these wide-eyed freshmen. “This is considered a junior-level class, so they’d been around.”

That is when he added to his course syllabuses: “Students must check e-mail daily.” May said the university now recommends similar wording…

 

The next step would seem to be having students and faculty and college staff all start using text messages or social media. However, this leads to other issues. Asking people to switch to new technologies which could then require training and practice. Privacy concerns could arise, particularly compared to more impersonal emails. There might be the argument that doing this means getting on a technology treadmill that goes faster and faster – students switch to the next big thing and everyone else must follow.

Another interesting question to ask is what kind of interaction aided by technology best leads to improved learning outcomes? Needing to communicate information is important but what exactly boosts learning? In The Dumbest Generation, Mark Bauerlein argues new technologies don’t typically boost learning even as they might improve engagement. Yet, colleges are moving to moving to more online learning. This can lead to learning at different paces, cuts down on costs, and makes classes available to more people. But, does it lead to more learning?

Sociology is now “en vogue” with tech companies like SnapChat?

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SnapChat has its own staff sociologist:

To wit: This week Snapchat co-founder Evan Spiegel sat down with The Verge to show off a new Snapchat feature called “stories,” which allows users to create and share with friends a compilation of images that lasts up to 24 hours. Along the way, Spiegel adroitly dropped some sociological theory into the mix. But rather than just citing one of the popular social scientists (say, Duncan Watts, Robin Dunbar, or Nicholas Christakis), whose names one typically invokes as a matter of course in these situations, Spiegel did one better. He cited Snapchat’s own staff sociologist…

Snapchat actually has its own sociology researcher on staff, Nathan Jurgenson, made famous for “The IRL Fetish,” an essay on the augmented reality of our digital lives.

“He invented a concept called ‘digital dualism’—something our company is fascinated by,” says Spiegel. “It’s the notion that people conceptualize the world into online and offline, which makes for a lot of very awkward experiences.”

That Snapchat would carve out a position on its small but growing team for a social theorist makes perfect sense. Against all odds, sociology is suddenly en vogue. These days, few things are more chic in the social media business than casually explaining how the hypotheses of some obscure, academic sociologist (Stanley Milgram, Elihu Katz, Paul Lazarsfeld, etc.) explains, for instance, why one cat video went viral on a social network and not another (see Peretti, Jonah).

All of which is threatening to turn the acquisition of living, breathing sociologists into a newfangled status symbol of sorts. After all, any two-bit, wannabe startup can decorate its offices with a foosball table or a Kegerator. It takes a certain level of moxy, on the other hand, to trick out your staff with a proprietary sociologist.

Sociologists as “newfangled status symbol[s]”? This might be a bit overstated. Still, why not? If many of these tech companies are creating products intended to facilitate social interaction, why not employ sociologists who have been thinking about these issues, can collect data about, and analyze the experiences of users? Sociologists could work well in business settings to help firms understand what is currently happening and develop new ideas.

Perhaps what sociologists really need to happen in order to break into this field is for a few sociologists themselves to develop apps and social media platforms. Imagine some entrepreneurial sociologists who have some coding and/or business background putting together a viable platform based on sociological theories and principles. Why couldn’t this happen?

Sociologist/CIA fellow describes “the paradox of the war on terror”

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A recent sociology dissertation asked members of the CIA to describe their work and the “war on terror”:

Nolan, a CIA Graduate Fellow in sociology, produced the ethnography by making observations and interviewing 20 analysts in NCTC’s Directorate of Intelligence (DI) while also working full time as a counterterrorism analyst at Nation Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) from January 2010 to January 2011.

She notes that many analysts feel overwhelmed because “they often were not really sure what their jobs were, and they felt that they had very little understanding of what other people in the organization do.”…

What Anna detailed is the paradox of the War on Terror: The U.S. is fighting, but there are no clear day-to-day objectives. There is an enemy, but it is more of a network than an entity. There is an objective, but there is no clear way to win.

Last year The Washington Post, in a report on the NTCT’s disposition matrix, noted that Obama administration officials believe that U.S. global kill/capture operations “are likely to be extended at least another decade. Given the way al-Qaeda continues to metastasize, some officials said no clear end is in sight.”

I’m not quite sure this is confusing, as the article then goes on to suggest. This is a new kind of operation but the parameters are not entirely unknown. The U.S. is working against social networks, which take time to understand and track. (Think of recent efforts for academics and police to analyze the social networks of gangs.)

However, we could ask whether this new reality matches the kind of bureaucratic structure common in larger organizations. If the objectives change consistently as does the information coming in, it seems like there has to be a corresponding structure that allows smaller units to act somewhat independently and quickly respond to situations. Yet, more smaller and independent units still require coordination so they are not working at cross-odds or important information and actions fall through the cracks.

Similarly, it requires a different mentality from the public who might prefer clearly defined operations. Fighting terrorism is not that. Even when there are “successes,” it can take years to lead to them. “Winning” is not one-time event where a peace treaty is signed but rather the ongoing amount of time citizens in the United States are not threatened. (Americans have some experience with these ongoing wars. See the war on drugs and the war on poverty.)

It seems like there is a lot of room here for sociologists to investigate the war on terrorism, the military, the government, and the responses of the American public. Sociologists may have shied away from military sociology in recent decades but this is a critical component for understanding today’s world…

Why Americans have the world’s largest refrigerators

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Move over McMansions, hello world’s largest refrigerators:

Americans have the biggest refrigerators in the world — 17.5 cubic feet of volume on average. The size of our refrigerators is followed closely by Canadians while the rest of the world lags far behind. Since our refrigerators run day and night, they use more energy than any other household appliance, which means their size has ramifications for the planet’s rate of global warming. However, the enormous popularity of refrigerators in the United States is an indicator of the value of refrigeration both for preserving the food we buy and for the convenience that comes when such huge machines are stocked. The fact that we put perishable food in the refrigerator (even sometimes when it doesn’t belong there) suggests that we still remember refrigeration’s most basic advantage: to prevent food from spoiling before we consume it.

While the usefulness of refrigerators explains their prevalence, it does not explain their size. Most people would agree that fresh food tastes better than anything that’s been kept in a refrigerator for even a short amount of time. So why then would anyone want a weeks’ worth of perishable food stored in their kitchen at one time? Are Americans slaves to convenience? While our large refrigerators do limit the number of shopping trips we have to take, they also make it possible for us to consume a much greater variety of foods than we ever did without them in our kitchens…

Because the average American family goes grocery shopping once a week, a gigantic refrigerator is required to keep all the perishables they acquire on that trip. Household refrigerators differ greatly from country to country because the characteristics that citizens in different countries want in their refrigerators are reflections of their cultures so at this point in history once weekly shopping trips is an almost uniquely American habit. While Americans and Canadians want storage capacity, European countries are generally more concerned with energy efficiency or the cost of their operation. Since Americans have always had abundant natural resources (like food), a large refrigerator has become closely identified around the world with the American way of life.

While large refrigerators are a recent development, ice and refrigeration have actually played an oversized role in American culture for a very long time. Before refrigerators, American iceboxes kept our food cold, at least as long as nobody opened them too often. “Who ever heard of an American without an icebox?,” wrote the British travel writer Winifred James in 1914. “It is his country’s emblem. It asserts his nationality as conclusively as the Stars and Stripes afloat from his roof-tree, besides being much more useful in keeping his butter cool.” “The Hard Times Refrigerator,” sold by the Boston Scientific Refrigerator in 1877 for people who were facing difficult economic circumstances was nothing but a wooden chest big enough to store fifty pounds of ice.

It sounds like decisions in American about other areas in life – priority on convenience and having food already at hand, food centers distant from concentrations of population and innovations in transporting cold foods, the suburbs and driving (?) – led to these large refrigerators. I’m not quite sure what prompted this: “Americans had an early collective desire for cold things.” This could be a new rallying cry: “American Exceptionalism: the biggest refrigerators!”

There seems to be a pattern here, especially when compared to the rest of the world: big refrigerators, big houses, big SUVs, Big Gulps, big land mass, big box stores…

Should new “Buy American” pushes be lauded if they occur because goods are now cheaper to make in the US?

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Walmart is purchasing and selling more goods made in America – primarily because making some things in America is now cheaper:

In many cases, Wal-Mart’s suppliers had already decided to produce in the United States, as rising wages in China and other emerging economies, along with increased labor productivity and flexibility back home, eroded the allure of offshore production.

Though wrapped in the stars and stripes, the world’s largest retailer’s push to bring jobs back to the United States also makes business sense both for suppliers and retailers.

Some manufacturers are finding they can profitably produce certain goods at home that they once made offshore. And retailers like Wal-Mart benefit from being able to buy those goods closer to distribution centers and stores with lower shipping costs, while gaining goodwill by selling more U.S.-made products.

“This is not a public relations effort. This is an economic, financial, mathematical-driven effort. The economics are substantially different than they were in the 80s and 90s,” Bill Simon, chief executive of the Walmart U.S. chain, told the Reuters Global Consumer and Retail Summit earlier this month.

To restate, this isn’t because of some commitment to the United States or patriotism or creating American jobs. This is because the goods can be made more cheaply in the US due low-wage workers in other countries now earning more and rising transportation costs. Thus, if items could once again be made and shipped more cheaply overseas, businesses would likely chase that again. Granted, profits of American companies might be good (shareholders, for example, might be happy) but is this the only way to assess manufacturing and sales decisions? Is selling products partly on the fact that they are made in America then somewhat deceptive?

Argument: scientists need help in handling big data

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Collecting, analyzing, and interpreting big data may just be a job that requires more scientists:

For projects like NEON, interpreting the data is a complicated business. Early on, the team realized that its data, while mid-size compared with the largest physics and biology projects, would be big in complexity. “NEON’s contribution to big data is not in its volume,” said Steve Berukoff, the project’s assistant director for data products. “It’s in the heterogeneity and spatial and temporal distribution of data.”

Unlike the roughly 20 critical measurements in climate science or the vast but relatively structured data in particle physics, NEON will have more than 500 quantities to keep track of, from temperature, soil and water measurements to insect, bird, mammal and microbial samples to remote sensing and aerial imaging. Much of the data is highly unstructured and difficult to parse — for example, taxonomic names and behavioral observations, which are sometimes subject to debate and revision.

And, as daunting as the looming data crush appears from a technical perspective, some of the greatest challenges are wholly nontechnical. Many researchers say the big science projects and analytical tools of the future can succeed only with the right mix of science, statistics, computer science, pure mathematics and deft leadership. In the big data age of distributed computing — in which enormously complex tasks are divided across a network of computers — the question remains: How should distributed science be conducted across a network of researchers?

Two quick thoughts:

1. There is a lot of potential here for crossing disciplinary boundaries to tackle big data projects. This isn’t just about parceling out individual pieces of the project; bringing multiple perspectives together could lead to an improved final outcome.

2. I wonder if sociologists aren’t particularly well-suited for this kind of big data work. Given our emphasis on theory and methods, we both emphasize the big picture as well as how to effectively collect, analyze, and interpret data. Sociology students could be able to step into such projects and provide needed insights.

Peak sprawl does not mean the end of suburbs but rather their densification

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One researcher argues the suburbs of the future will be less sprawl and have more density:

Since 2009, 60 percent of new office, retail and rental properties in Atlanta have been built in what Christopher Leinberger calls “walkable urban places” – those neighborhoods already blessed by high Walk Scores or on their way there. That new construction has taken place on less than 1 percent of the metropolitan Atlanta region’s land mass, suggesting a shift in real estate patterns from expansion at the city’s edges to denser development within its existing borders.

“This is indicative that we’re seeing the end of sprawl,” says Leinberger, a research professor with the George Washington University School of Business, who led the study in conjunction with Georgia Tech and the Atlanta Regional Commission. “It does not say that everything turns off. There will still be new drivable suburban development. It’s just that the majority will be walkable urban, and it will be not just in the redevelopment of our downtowns, but in the urbanization of the suburbs.”…

“I think there’s a cause-and-effect issue here,” he says. “I think that when the economy picks up steam, it’s going to be because we learn how to build walkable urban places. Real estate caused this debacle, and real estate has always acted as a catalyst for economic recoveries.”

He figures we’re sputtering along at 2 percent growth precisely because we’re not building enough of the walkable urban product that the market wants. “And it’s signaling with pretty flashing lights,” he says, “to build more of this stuff.”

New Urbanists FTW! The argument here is that the suburbs will continue – with their features of home ownership, cars, local control, autonomy, etc. – but they will look different due to denser designs, feature different kinds of community and social life, and include more features like cultural centers or mixed-use neighborhoods that are more traditionally associated with cities.

One obstacle to this might be how much existing suburbs are willing to increase their densities. This make make financial sense or be good for growth but it could also alter the character of more sprawling communities. For example, many suburbs have already considered or built transit-oriented development where denser housing and space is built near mass transit. But, would they be willing to extend such construction across more of their area?

How much Walter White may have lowered his neighbor’s property values

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Breaking Bad protagonist and meth kingpin Walter White might not have made his neighbors happy:

In his 2011 paper, “The Lasting Effects of Crime: The Relationship of Discovered Methamphetamine Laboratories and Home Values,” Holy Cross econ professor Joshua Congdon-Hohman calculates how much damage meth labs cause to surrounding home values after they’re discovered…Using housing sales data from Akron, Ohio — home to that state’s largest concentration of meth labs  — Congdon-Hohman finds the following:

  • For homes sold within an eighth of a mile after a lab is discovered, there is a 10.5% decline in sales prices.
  • Within the first year of the discovery the decline can be as much as 19%.
  • For homes sold within a quarter of a mile after a lab is discovered, there is a 4.5% decline.
  • The declines persist for at least two years.
  • It didn’t matter if an additional meth lab was discovered — just a single busted cook site can take down several blocks.

Summary: you don’t want meth makers on your street, particularly if you want more money when you sell your house. If reduced property values aren’t enough, I suspect the typical suburbanite also doesn’t want meth makers on their street because they don’t fit the image of a happy, stable, law-abiding neighborhood.

Trader turned sociologist writes book about Goldman Sachs

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A new book on Goldman Sachs is written from an interesting perspective: a trader for the firm turned sociology PhD student.

After writing a paper about organizational change, a professor encouraged him to write about Wall Street.

“He said, ‘No one in sociology understands banks, so you can make a contribution in that area,’ ” Mr. Mandis said…

The essence of his argument is that Goldman came under a variety of pressures that resulted in slow, incremental changes to the firm’s culture and business practices, resulting in the place being much different from what it was in 1979, when the bank’s former co-head, John Whitehead, wrote its much-vaunted business principles.

These changes included the shift to a public company structure, a move that limited Goldman executives’ personal exposure to risk and shifted it to shareholders. The I.P.O. also put pressure on the bank to grow, causing trading to become a more dominant focus. And Goldman’s rapid growth led to more potential for conflicts of interest and not putting clients’ interests first, Mr. Mandis says.

More sociological analysis of the financial industry, particularly from the inside of important firms, is needed. Considering their outsized importance on the global economy as well as global cities, it is a little surprising such books aren’t more common.

The review is fairly favorable, calling the book “accessible” and “clearly written.” However, the review doesn’t hint at criticism of Goldman Sachs. Given the opinions of many sociologists, is that would many sociologists would expect when reading such a book?